On the morning of February 16, 1997, a man walked into the Captain D's on Lebanon Road in the Donelson neighborhood of Nashville and asked about a job. Night-shift staff said later that he had come by the evening before and been told to return when the manager was in. Inside, he forced two employees, Steve Hampton, twenty-five, and Sarah Jackson, sixteen, into the cooler and shot them. The day before, Paul Dennis Reid Jr. had been fired from his job as a dishwasher at a Shoney's.
Reid was born on November 12, 1957, and grew up in Richland Hills, Texas, outside Fort Worth. In 1983 he was convicted of the armed robbery of a Houston steakhouse and sentenced to twenty years; he served seven and was paroled in 1990. He went to Nashville hoping to make it as a country singer and was still on parole when the killings began.
On March 23, 1997, a month after Donelson, he robbed a McDonald's in Hermitage at midnight. Andrea Brown, seventeen, Ronald Santiago, twenty-seven, and Robert A. Sewell Jr., twenty-three, were shot in the storeroom. A fourth employee, José Antonio Ramírez Gonzalez, was shot at with a gun that jammed and then stabbed seventeen times; he played dead until the robber left with the register money and called for help. On the night of April 23, at the Baskin-Robbins on Wilma Rudolph Boulevard in Clarksville, about fifty miles northwest of Nashville, he pushed Angela Holmes, twenty-one, and Michelle Mace, sixteen, back inside as they were about to leave, forced them to open the safe and drove them away. Michelle's brother Craig, waiting outside to take her home, found the store empty. The next morning a man walking his dog at the Dunbar Cave State Natural Area found their bodies. Both had been stabbed in the neck with such force that the blade reached bone, and the Tennessee Supreme Court later noted that they had been conscious for five to fifteen minutes as they bled to death.
A composite from the Captain D's witnesses led officers to the Shoney's where Reid worked, and he had been questioned before he was fired, but it was not the murders that caught him. On June 1, 1997, he turned up at the Joelton home of his former manager at Shoney's, Mitch Roberts, pleading for his job back, and when Roberts refused he produced a weapon and tried to handcuff him and put him in a car. Roberts fought him off and Reid was arrested. Forensic evidence did the rest; a detective said later that Reid had learned about crime scenes in a Texas prison but did not understand the microscopic traces he had left. On June 25 he faced reporters for the first time at a night-court hearing.
He was tried separately for each restaurant and convicted on all seven counts of first-degree murder, with especially aggravated kidnapping and robbery counts, and each jury returned death. The Court of Criminal Appeals rejected his appeals in 2001, and the Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed in 2005. Police also regarded him as responsible for the January 1997 shooting of a Shoney's night manager, Charles Thoet Jr., on Dickerson Road, but never found evidence to charge him.
Doctors found him brain-damaged and schizophrenic. He told his lawyers and reporters he was being controlled and tormented by a military government, and stopped cooperating with the lawyers because he thought they were part of it. In 2006 Tennessee scheduled his execution the day after it executed Sedley Alley, but a federal judge stayed it to decide whether he was competent to give up his appeals, and the litigation outlived him. He died of pneumonia and heart and respiratory failure at Nashville General Hospital on November 1, 2013, eleven days short of his fifty-sixth birthday, under seven sentences of death.